Free Champion Rotation, Week of Nov 15 (plus 10 supports)

The free to play champion rotation for this week features Cassiopeia, Gangplank, Jarvan IV, Jhin, Karma, Lucian, Master Yi, Soraka, Tryndamere, and Vel'Koz. For the next four weeks, 10 extra supports will also be added to the rotation - Blitzcrank, Brand, Braum, Janna, Leona, Nami, Sona, Taric, Thresh, and Zyra.

Extra Supports in Free Champion Rotation

Starting on Tuesday, Nov 15, we’re trying something a little different by adding ten support champs to the free champion rotation (for a total of 20). The champs are:

Blitzcrank

Brand

Braum

Janna

Leona

Nami

Sona

Taric

Thresh

Zyra

These extra ten supports will remain available for four weeks, while the rest of the rotation continues as normal.

This is basically a little experiment to see if giving players free access to a broader pool of supports improves queue times. For more information, check out Meddler’s post on the current state of Support!"

Some thoughts on Support

As mentioned here, we’re about to try an experiment where we make a lot of supports free for a month. For anyone interested I wanted to talk in more detail about our thinking on both supports in general and this test in particular.

Current State of Supports

At present support is a position that significantly fewer players want to play than other roles. That’s unfortunate because it results in:

Long matchmaking queues (not enough support players to go around).

Players having to play a role they’d prefer not to (getting autofilled to support to partially address the above problem).

Players having to play a role more often than they’d prefer (if they want to queue as support secondary or fill).

We’d therefore like to make support attractive to more players, without taking away what makes it appealing to existing support players. That’s something we’re planning to put quite a bit of work into in 2017 after we’ve got the pre-season changes generally polished and balanced.

There are a range of things we want to address, or at least investigate. Those include:

Gold income as support

Should it be closer to, or matching, the income of other roles to give support players more agency?

Assuming it should what are the best ways to give that extra income to supports without creating problems in other roles or incentivising weird behaviour?

Recognition of success as support

Damage dealers get great celebrations of their skilled play via things like killing sprees/multi-kills, good KDAs/CS numbers, tracking of damage dealt etc. Support achievements by contrast can be much lower visibility and satisfaction (clutch saves for example aren’t highlighted well, even if they’re as impressive a piece of play as a well executed multi-kill).

Itemisation

Are support items sufficiently compelling or does power progression as a support often feel worse than other roles?

Is Sightstone in the right place as a mandatory 800g first buy? Are there other adjustments to the vision game that would be good both for the experience of playing support and the game in general?

Pre-Game

Are supports properly served by pre-game choices (runes/masteries/summoner spells) in terms of their effectiveness?

Are those choices sufficiently satisfying to use?

Laning patterns

Many champions played as supports have really engaging gameplay in lane based off their positioning, harass, wave pushing, vision play etc. Some supports, or at least some supports in certain lane match ups, can end up having to play really passively though. How can we improve that?

Etc

Why extra free rotation champions?

So as mentioned we’re running a test where we add a number of extra champions to the free rotation. Those extra champs were picked because they’re good options if you’re playing support. They cover a range of different playstyles, from aggressive mages, to tanky initiators to protective casters. What we’re curious about is whether some players would enjoy playing support but haven’t yet found the right champion (the ‘I used to hate X role until I tried Y champion’ experience). We’re going to measure that by looking at the number of people who choose to queue up as support in normal draft games, since that queue has position select while also allowing the use of free rotation champions.

We’ll be making those champs available in addition to the regular weekly free rotation for four weeks in a row. We’re doing that to try and understand whether an extended period of free availability makes it noticeably more appealing to put time into learning a new champion (and potentially a new position too).

It’s certainly possible that this doesn’t have any measurable effect on interest in playing support during the course of this study—lack of access to the right champions probably isn’t one of the biggest factors in the lower interest in playing support. But, this is a particularly easy test to try out, and the pre-season’s a good time to do it (more people playing normal draft). Over the course of the year we want to work on the other issues mentioned above. In the meantime however we feel like this is a good place to start.

Hopefully that’s a helpful look at some of our current thinking. Let us know if you’ve got any feedback or questions about what we’re looking at here, supports in general or other related stuff.

One thing that can help with visibility is a Damage Shielded stat, imo.Karma, Janna, Sona, and Lulu players would appreciate it.

That's the sort of thing we'll be looking into yeah. Some possible arguments for a 'damage mitigated' stat as well in order to also capture effects that reduce incoming damage that aren't shields (e.g. Armor/MR from Braum W)."

Agreed. But my thinking is that just because there are multiple factors effecting it doesn't mean that each factor is an equal contributor to the issue.

With you there. Some things (such as better recognition through stats) are easier to implement than others, both from a technical perspective and in terms of how much they risk disrupting things that already work well (extra gold's riskier in that regard for example).